Gastbeitrag

Caroline Wiedmer*

Forced Entanglements:
Stories of Expulsion, Sovereign Power
and Bare Life

© 2019 Caroline Wiedmer, licensee De Gruyter Open. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
68 10.2478/kwg-2018-0016 | 3. Jahrgang 2018 Heft 2: 63–85

Abstract: This article explores the contemporary practice of forced detainment and expulsion in Switzer-
land from two distinct perspectives: the 1995 law on coercive measures that first introduced the practice
in Switzerland, as well as the cultural context that led to its constitution, and the documentary Le vol
spécial by Fernand Melgar, made some fifteen years after the law was first introduced, which records the
law’s consequences for the daily lives of rejected asylum seekers awaiting expulsion. Using Giorgio Agam-
ben’s theoretical work on the states of exception and bare life, I seek to uncover what I call the narrative
of expulsion, arguing that narrative politics operates on a number of interrelated levels not only to shape
the context and practice of forced expulsion that undergird the asylum politics in Switzerland, and other
countries, today, but ultimately also to change the post-enlightenment narrative of the political subject
and challenge the efficacy of the Human Rights regime the world over.

Keywords: Forced deportation; refugee politics; legal culture; human rights; Switzerland; Giorgio
Agamben; Fernand Melgar; narrative politics; story of expulsion; asylum regime

*Caroline Wiedmer, Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, Franklin University Switzerland

1 Introduction two hours after the announcement, the Swiss

On March 17, 2010, a Nigerian refugee by the
name of Joseph Ndukaku Chiakwa died in the
Ausschaffungsgefängnis, or deportation prison,
at Zurich airport while being prepared for depor-
tation on a so-called Sonderflug, or “special
flight”, to Nigeria. “Special flights” are used in
Switzerland when individuals whose asylum
requests have been denied, or who are found to
be in Switzerland without proper papers, refuse
to leave the country voluntarily. At the time of his
death, Chiakwa had been subjected to a so-called
level-IV deportation procedure, in which refugees
have their hands and feet bound, are strapped
into a chair, are made to wear a full face mask,
and are then carried onto the flight in the chair.
He died during this procedure. In the immediate
wake of his death, all special flights were sus-
pended by the State Secretariat for Migration,
as it awaited the autopsy report. The Institute
of Forensic Medicine at the University of Zurich,
tasked with this autopsy, found that Chiakwa had
begun a hunger strike two months previously
upon being incarcerated in December of 2009. He
had, it was found, suffered from an undetected
heart problem, which, aggravated by the effects
of the hunger strike and the anxiety of the depor-
tation procedure, ultimately led to his death.
These findings were announced on May 25, 2010,
a little more than two months after the incident;
State Secretariat for Migration lifted the suspen-
sion and began planning for the departure of the
next Sonderflug.1
This article investigates the practice of deten-
tion and forced expulsion in Switzerland that led
to Chiakwa’s death in two overlapping texts: first,
the so-called Bundesgesetz über die Zwangs-
massnahmen im Ausländerrecht,2 or Federal Act
on Coercive Measures in the Law Governing For-
eign Nationals, enacted in 1995, which strength-
ened the legal basis for forced expulsion in Swit-
zerland, and the historical context in which it was
forged; and second, a documentary by Swiss
filmmaker Fernand Melgar entitled Le vol spe-
cial, from 2012, which records life in a detention
centre for people slated for expulsion. They each
offer distinct views, and distinct interpretations,
of detention and forced expulsion, and their cul-
1  The human rights group Augenauf assembled a dossi-
er on the case, which includes the original autopsy report
by the Institute for Forensic Medicine at the University of
Zurich, the report from pathology, the report submitted
by Chiakwa’s family’s lawyer, a report from a cardiologist
questioning the original autopsy report, and links to a
number of newspaper articles. See http://www.augenauf.
ch/dossiers/70-ausschaffungen/125-joseph-ndukaku-chi-
akwa-alias-alex-khamma.html, accessed on April 2, 2018.
2  See Art. 69–71, Federal Act on Foreign Nationals, https://
www.admin.ch/opc/en/classified-compilation/20020232/
index.html, accessed January 14, 2019.
Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift - 1/2018 69

tural consequences. Because the perspectives I begin with a discussion of the role of narrative
are so disparate, epistemologically, ideologically in the asylum system, then move to Agamben’s
and structurally, their confrontation brings to the theoretical positions on sovereign power and his
fore the often invisible links among law, the cul- notions of “bios” and “zoe”, and, related to them,
tural context in which it is created, and the actual of bare life. I then explore the legal proceedings in
practice it enables, all of which illuminate the the early 1990s that culminated in the federal act
implications of state control in the realm of Swiss on coercive measures, the law that made possible
asylum politics. Comparing these perspectives both the institution of the Ausschaffungszentrum,
also reveals deep fissures in the master narratives or deportation centre, and the institution of the
that help us think our historical moment, not only so-called vol spécial, or special flight, that today
in Switzerland but around the world. The overar- takes on a central role in enforcing the decision to
ching theoretical framework I employ to read the expel those who are not allowed to stay in Swit-
two texts, and the events surrounding them, is zerland. Finally, I focus specifically on Melgar’s
indebted to Giorgio Agamben’s conceptualisation film Le vol spécial as a document that not only
of states of exception, those extralegal regimes a shows many of Agamben’s ideas on bare life in
sovereign power creates in the name of the public action, but also attempts to reveal the inmates’
good, and to Agamben’s ideas on the production stories of expulsion by giving them a voice and
of what he terms “bare life,” or life deprived of all an audience.
rights by such a power. Reading the law and the
documentary film against one another in light of
Agamben’s theories helps illuminate not only the
2 Narrating the Story of Expulsion
legal and documentary texts themselves, but also
our understanding of the political practice at work
How is the asylum process shaped by narra-
in asylum regimes everywhere.
tive? From the asylum seekers’ point of view,
The politics of narrative is central to both
the process begins with the stories they tell upon
the law and the documentary film I discuss here
arrival in a would-be host country: stories that
as case studies; the entire asylum process is
explain how and why they fled their countries of
informed by its entanglement with a number of
origins, and how they arrived in the hoped-for
legal, political and cultural levels. In addressing
host countries to apply for asylum. These stories
the intersections of the legal, documentary and
are subsequently written down by case workers
theoretical texts, therefore, I underscore the nar-
in refugee reception centres, along with notes
rative dimensions of the texts proper as a way
on how the case workers interpret the refugees’
to bring nuance not only to the legal processes
stories; these reports are then followed by asylum
and the documentary, and their interaction with
decisions handed down by yet another set of offi-
one another, but also to our conception of the
cials, who base their own reports on these initial
complex cultural mechanisms that shape the
interpretations by case workers. In most cases,
Swiss asylum regime, and by extension asylum
these last interpretations ultimately shape the
regimes of many democracies. This framing of
way the refugees’ stories, which set the process
texts and cultural processes as narrative, in turn,
in motion in the first place, are to take their
reveals some of the more troublesome direc-
course. If, however, an asylum seeker appeals a
tions contemporary asylum politics is taking, not
decision, the story takes yet another loop, this
only in today’s Switzerland, but across Europe
time processed by the relevant courts, adding
and beyond. I argue that what I call the story of
details along the way that include legal consid-
expulsion—which includes both the way we speak
erations until it lands once again on the doorstep
of expulsion and coercive measures in systems
of the would-be asylee, the product of multiple
of asylum, and the conditions under which those
layerings, one story on top of the other, like a pal-
who are slated for expulsion tell stories—is a nar-
impsest. This relatively contained initial cycle of
rative that threatens the humanitarian ideals on
tellings and retellings passed on from refugees to
which ‘Switzerland’ depends. Indeed, the story of
administrators of various kinds, to legal experts
expulsion shows that the very notion of human
and back, operates in its turn within a number
rights is endangered the world over.
70
of larger, informal story cycles, each following its
own particular logic: information shared among
refugees, and between refugees and traffickers,
on what to include and what to omit in their stories
in order to achieve asylum; stories told among
case workers about what sounds authentic and
what does not; stories told by the laws and reg-
ulations of the respective asylum regimes; and,
finally, stories told about refugees in the larger
culture: who they are, and what they potentially
bring to, and take away from, the communities in
which they hope to make a new life.
Each of these linked realms of storytelling—
the personal, the bureaucratic, the legal, the
political and the cultural—is informed by its own
interests, by its own legal and moral codes, and
by its own ideological underpinnings. And quite
often, these linked narrative contexts are contra-
dictory and controversial, occasionally at cross
purposes, and yet making up a whole that deter-
mines the experience a refugee will have in a
given country at a given time. Inscribed in these
narrative contexts, too, at every level and in each
realm, is the question of power: who gets to tell
a story? Who is obliged to tell a story, and who is
forbidden to? Whose interpretation is considered
valid or suspect, true or false? What parameters
are used to assess a story? Who gets to make
that decision? Why are certain stories and voices
amplified while others are dampened, like a radio
turned down low to better hear the conversation
in the room? And what is the role of the vari-
ous identities at play in this hot tangle? To make
things even more complicated, these questions
about narrative never arise in a vacuum; they all
have their own detailed backstories and political
contexts, which have evolved, often over centu-
ries, as different legal regimes have shaped their
relation to its subjects, and as foreigners have
been thought about, talked about, represented,
rendered invisible or visible, legalised or crimi-
nalised, in theoretical, national and supranational
contexts. And finally, there is the realm of silence,
from whence stories are only rarely heard, and
about which, we only rarely tell stories. This is
the realm of expulsion.
The unpredictable moment of Chiakwa’s
death, and others since then, in the context
of forced detention and deportations, is one of
those rare moments in which the realm of expul-
sion, suddenly visible, revealed the fractures
10.2478/kwg-2018-0016 | 3. Jahrgang 2018 Heft 2: 63–85
and strains in the narrative economy that Agnes
Woolley calls “the asylum story”;3 it allows us
to delve beneath this economy to read the vio-
lence that resides in the story of expulsion. These
stories of expulsion linger, often unheard, in a
distinct area of the asylum regime, in a realm
to which humans are banned after their stories
have been found to be unfit by the bureaucracy
that steers the asylum system. These are sto-
ries that ordinarily lack an audience to listen, or a
platform on which to be told. In that sense, they
lack both addressees and agencies, rendering the
storytellers themselves essentially voiceless, and
position those trying to excavate the stories on
contested ground. They are, finally, stories that
reveal the ruptures and fractures in the human
rights regime. Later in this article, we will revisit
the news of Chiakwa’s death from a somewhat
different angle when it ploughs into the story line
maintained in Le Frambois, the detention centre
featured in the documentary Le vol spécial, leav-
ing jagged edges in its account of purportedly
smooth operations and laying bare the architec-
ture of power that suffuses the entire asylum sys-
tem. It asks questions about the master narrative
featuring a modern political subject, the narra-
tive vacuum surrounding the banned subject, and
the disjunction between humanitarian values and
those of a sovereign—in the case of Switzerland,
both the Federal Council and the people—bent on
constituting itself precisely by undermining those
values: narratives all well-established over the
course of more than a century in Switzerland, but
now being gradually challenged.
3 I
 II States of Exception and Bare
Life: Giorgio Agamben’s Homo
Sacer
Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer identifies the
legally and socially dispossessed as a central
hinge in the constitution of modern sovereign
power. The dispossessed, in Agamben’s telling, is
the enigmatic figure of the homo sacer, or sacred
3  See, for an excellent article on the veracity claim in nar-
ratives in the asylum regime, Agnes Woolley (2017), Nar-
rating the “Asylum Story”: Between Literary and Legal Sto-
rytelling, Interventions, 19:3, 376–394, http://eprints.bbk.
ac.uk/21157/1/21157.pdf, p. 5, accessed November 2019.
Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift - 1/2018
man, from the archaic Roman law, who could
be killed with impunity, but never sacrificed. His
main goal, in a four-volume work, is to trace the
mechanism of totalitarian ideologies in moder-
nity around the key links he establishes between
the sovereign, the sacred man and the ban, sug-
gesting that sovereign forms of power in today’s
democracies are defined by their very ability to
bring power to bear on subjects in their jurisdic-
tion in a way that turns them into homines sacri,
forced by the sovereign to lead what he terms
bare lives—lives without recourse to sovereign
protection. In Agamben’s words, “the inclusion of
bare life in the political realm constitutes the orig-
inal—if concealed—nucleus of sovereign power. It
can even be said that the production of a biopo-
litical body is the original activity of a sovereign
power.”4 In terms of narrative, the dominant story
about law and the sovereign is turned on its head
in this interpretation: rather than bringing justice
to its subjects and safeguarding their rights, the
sovereign’s inherent identity rests on the power
to suspend rights and to shape subjects as out-
casts.
This figure of the outcast and the notion of
bare life deserve a closer look. The homo sacer or
“sacred man” in Roman law was a figure banned
from society; sacred, not so much in a religious
sense, but rather in the sense that he had been
set aside, and accursed. Agamben deploys this
figure as an allegory to develop Michel Foucault’s
theories of biopolitics, while further elaborating
the notion of the state of exception, first articu-
lated by the German legal scholar Carl Schmitt
in the 1920s, during the Weimar Republic, and,
in a different vein, after World War II in the con-
text of decolonisation.5 Following Jean-Luc Nancy,
4  Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and
Bare Life, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 1998, p. 6 (emphasis in the original).
5  In the early 1920s, Schmitt argued in Political Theology.
Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty that the ap-
plication of legal norm presupposes social normality and
cannot apply to emergencies or chaos. In fact he maintains
in his early writing that continuing to apply law through the
usual channels of jurisdiction and administration in a case
of emergency would not only threaten to be haphazard
and ineffective, but would prevent the emergency itself
from being adequately addressed. Therefore, if it is true
that the application of legal norm to an abnormal situation
is no longer tenable, then a polity must be able to decide
to suspend legal norm when warranted. To Schmitt, it then
71
Agamben sees the suspension of law as taking
the form of a ban, in which what is to be banned
“is delivered over to its own separateness, and at
the same time, consigned to the mercy of the one
who abandons it—at once excluded and included,
removed and at the same time captured”.6 A per-
son who is abandoned by the law, he writes fur-
ther, is “exposed and threatened on the threshold
in which life and law, outside and inside, become
indistinguishable.”7 Thus, exposed by the struc-
ture of exception, the subject is conceptualised
by Agamben as living a bare life—a notion that
recuperates the distinction made by the ancient
Greeks between bios and zoe, two terms that
describe different dimensions of life, bios refer-
ring to the potentialities and possibilities of a life
lived in the public realm, zoe to the simple, bio-
logical fact of life lived in private, in the home or
oikos, beyond the interference of politics.8
Bare life, for its part, is not merely zoe, but
moves between the simple, biological fact of life
in private and bios, between the home and the
public realm, its precise location determined
in accordance with the needs of the sovereign
power of any given state and in any given time;
in Agamben’s words: “…every society—even the
follows that a person or institution in a position to decide to
suspend the law and to use extra-legal force to normalise
the emergency situation is the sovereign. In a post-war
work entitled Nomos of the Earth in the International Law
of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, Schmitt’s conceptualis-
ation of the exception shifts somewhat. His focus during
this time of intense debate over how formerly colonised
lands are to be re-ordered is no longer on the fact that the
ability to decide exception and to suspend normative law
defines the sovereign, but instead shifts to consider what
constitutes law and order in the first place. In his quest to
make visible the intimate relationship between land and
law, Schmitt returns to an originary understanding of order
as constituted and sustained through the appropriation
and division of land, territory and resources. This meaning,
Schmitt argues, is captured in the word nomos, which con-
tains three connotations: appropriation, distribution and
production. This distribution of land results in what Schmitt
has called the Ordnung and Ortung, or order and local-
isation, of land and habit, observing that “nomos is the
immediate form in which the political and social order of
a people becomes spatially visible.” “Sovereign is he who
decides on the exceptional case,” Schmitt states famously
at the very beginning of Political Theology.
6  Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 110
7  Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 28
8  Agamben Homo Sacer, p. 6
72
most modern—decides who its sacred men will
be.”9 And further to the notion of bare life:
… the decisive fact is that, together with the process
by which exception everywhere becomes the rule,
the realm of bare life—which is originally situated at
the margins of the political order—gradually begins
to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and
inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe, right and
fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction.10
No longer is the zone of indistinction to be found
at the margin of a political commons; rather,
the realms where people are forced to live bare
lives are increasingly placed inside of communi-
ties. This quintessential zone of indistinction to
Agamben is the Nazi concentration camp, repre-
senting to his mind “the very paradigm of politi-
cal space at the point at which politics becomes
biopolitics […] in which power confronts nothing
but pure life, without any mediation”.11
Does this mean that the concrete spaces cre-
ated in Switzerland by the law on coercive meas-
ures, or by the United States in Guantanamo Bay,
can be compared to Auschwitz? No, not the con-
crete spaces themselves, nor the kind, breadth
and depth of the perpetration. In fact, Agamben’s
proposition that Auschwitz be read as the para-
digmatic space for an emerging sovereign order
of exception seems to fly in the face of a wide-
spread position that holds Auschwitz to be incom-
parable to anything that pre-exists or succeeds it.
It is a position that sees the vastness of the suf-
fering inflicted, the arbitrary, extreme, sustained
cruelty of the camps, and the intentional system-
9  Agamben, Homo Sacer, 139
10  Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 9
11  Homo Sacer, p. 171. The often quoted passage on
the Nazi concentration camp as emblematic of modernity
reads as follows: “When our age tried to grant the unlocal-
isable a permanent and visible localisation, the result was
the concentration camp. The camp—and not the prison—is
the space that corresponds to the original structure of the
nomos. This is shown, among other things, by the fact
that while prison law only constitutes a particular sphere of
penal law and is not outside the normal order, the juridical
constellation that guides the camp is martial law and the
state of siege […]. As the absolute state of exception, the
camp is topologically different from a simple space of con-
finement. And it is this space of exception, in which the link
between localisation and order is definitely broken, that
has determined the crisis of the old ‘nomos of the earth’.”
Homo Sacer, p. 20.
10.2478/kwg-2018-0016 | 3. Jahrgang 2018 Heft 2: 63–85
atic genocide that underwrote them as nothing
less than a caesura in civilisation: an event that,
in the severity of its impact and depravity, could
not be repeated. Indeed, as Anthony Downey
notes,
Agamben’s argument at this point may seem immod-
erate if not controversial until we consider that the
ambition of power in the camps was the banalisation
of life: the stripping away of political community (bios
politikos) so as to produce ‘bare life’ - a life beyond
political and legal representation.12
And it is this banalisation of life, as a crucial first
step in the mechanism put in place by a sovereign
power, that renders life bare; and it is this mech-
anism inherent in the sovereign state’s deploy-
ment of the exception that Agamben compares
across the various manifestations of indistinct
zones in our present time, and not the degree or
vastness of suffering inflicted. He writes:
If this is true, if the essence of the camp consists in
the materialisation of the state of exception and in the
subsequent creation of a space in which bare life and
the juridical rule enter into a threshold of indistinction,
then we must admit that we find ourselves virtually in
the presence of a camp every time such a structure
is created, independent of the kinds of crime that are
committed there and whatever its denomination and
specific topography.13
For Agamben, then, it is the mechanisms that
rendered life banal and that produced the camps
that are continuous with, and not contiguous
to, political and legal processes in our age; the
so-called Schutzhaft, or protective custody, the
state of exception that made incarceration in
camps legally possible in Nazi Germany, becomes
a harbinger for similar mechanisms, which have
turned the very notion of exception into a com-
monplace.
If martial law, or states of exception, at the
beginning of the 20th century was proclaimed
primarily in reaction to wars and the chaos
they wrought, Agamben understands the pres-
ent-day notion of the exception, beginning with
the camps and re-contoured after September 11,
2001, and the ensuing “war on terror”, as one
12  Anthony Downey, “Zones of Indistinction: Giorgio Ag-
amben’s ‘Bare Life’ and the Politics of Aesthetics”, p. 114.
13  Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 174
Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift - 1/2018
in which the distinction is increasingly blurred
between ordinary law and the law of exception
that bans certain groups of people in a purported
effort to protect its citizens. Potential terrorists,
political prisoners, refugees, torture victims, the
vanished—all count among the dispossessed of
the late 20th and early 21st centuries, their sub-
ject positions in most cases readily recognisable
and comforting to those whose own subject posi-
tions would appear less vulnerable. In Agamben’s
more radical proposal, however, we lose the abil-
ity to recognise who in fact counts as a homo
sacer.14 Therefore, as the state of exception has,
in Agamben’s thinking, become the rule of law in
contemporary politics, “we are all virtually hom-
ines sacri.”15 “Bare life,” Agamben concludes, “is
no longer confined to a particular place or a defi-
nite category. It now dwells in the biological body
of every living being.”16 If the law of exception has
become exemplary of modernity, then what of the
modern political subject? Agamben’s proposition,
that homo sacer dwells in all of us, changes the
very idea of what constitutes the modern political
subject, who, along with the state of exception,
is also no longer the exception, but has instead
become emblematic of our times.17 And this in
turn challenges some of the more dominant mas-
ter narratives of our era.
Tracing the “ideological confluence between
the technologies of the novel and the law that
manifests in a common vocabulary and transitive
grammar of human personality development,”18
Joseph Slaughter argues that the modern human
rights regime as well as international legal con-
ceptions of the modern subject draw from the
narrative precepts and social vision laid down by
the 19th-century Bildungsroman. “The movement
of the subject from pure subjection to self-regu-
lation,” Slaughter observes in this context,
14  Anna-Maria Smith, “Neo-eugenics: A Feminist Critique
of Agamben”, https://arcade.stanford.edu/occasion/neo-eu-
genics-feminist-critique-agamben, accessed May 2018.
15  Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 115, emphasis mine.
16  Agamben, State of Exception, p. 115.
17  For a lucid discussion of Agamben’s state of exception
and his notion of bare life, see Anthony Downey, “Zones of
Indistinction: Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Bare Life’ and the Politics
of Aesthetics” Third Text, Vol. 23, Issue 2, March, Rout-
ledge: 2009, p. 109.
18  Joseph Slaughter, Human Rights Inc: The World Novel,
Narrative Form and International Law, New York: Fordham
University Press, 2007, 4.
73
describes the plot trajectory of the dominant transition
narrative of modernisation, which both the Bildungs-
roman and human rights law take for granted and
intensify in their progressive visions of human person-
ality development.19
And further, the Bildungsroman and human rights
law
are mutually enabling fictions: each projects an image
of the human personality that ratifies the other’s ide-
alistic visions of the proper relations between the indi-
vidual and society and the normative career of full and
free human personality development.20
The figure of homo sacer is antithetical to the
imaginary of the post-enlightenment subject cast
both in the Bildungsroman and human rights law.
The sacred man is granted neither the chance to
develop, nor to become a subject fully integrated
in his social context; and if Agamben is right,
and we have all become potential sacred men,
then the narrative trajectory of the modern polit-
ical subject is in danger of becoming usurped,
as is the idealised notion of human rights. For
the homines sacri of our time are individuals who
are by definition without rights, human or other-
wise, at the very moment, when they need them
the most. It is this paradox which is inscribed in
Agamben’s notion of states of exception, and its
implications for the relations between sovereign
power and bare life; and it is this paradox that
we see at work both in Fernando Melgar’s Le vol
special, where Melgar renders legible the homo
sacer in a modern-day Swiss “zone of indistinc-
tion”, the detention centres where those slated
for deportation are held until they are forced to
leave on their special flights, as well as in the
law on coercive measures from 1995, which made
these zones of indistinction possible, and which is
the focus below.
19  Slaughter, Human Rights Inc., 9; quoted in Agnes
Woolley (2017) “Narrating the ‘Asylum Story’: Between Lit-
erary and Legal Storytelling”, Interventions, 3–4.
20  Slaughter, Human Rights Inc., 5.
74
4 L
 ex Letten or “It’s enough for
Zurich to have a cold for all of
Switzerland to take to bed”21
The Zurich airport prison where Chiakwa died is,
like many prisons, on the edge of town. Unlike
other prisons, however, it is divided into two
areas, one for short-term incarceration and pre-
trial detention for “normal” prisoners convicted or
accused of a crime, the other to house people
slated for forced expulsion, incarcerated either
because their bid for asylum has been rejected,
or because they are in Switzerland without proper
papers—and not because they have committed
any crimes as defined under Swiss penal law.22
The construction of this facility took place in the
early 1990s and was part of the same historical
21  This quote is taken from a statement made by
Jean-Claude Zwahlen, as noted in the minutes of par-
liamentary debate in 1994. The complete quote reads
as follows: “Haste is not a good counsellor. In fact it is
enough for Zurich to have a cold for all of Switzerland to
go to bed and take a horse-remedy that is probably di-
sproportionate to the cause of the malady.” https://www.
amtsdruckschriften.bar.admin.ch/viewOrigDoc/20023755.
pdf?ID=20023755, p. 93, accessed July 30, 2018, trans-
lation mine.
22  https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/schweiz/standard/
Aus-dem-Innern-des-Ausschaffungsgefaengnisses/
story/31691996. The entire building is an ensemble of
square cement blocks built in the mid-1990s, following
blueprints of traditional prison architecture. Back in the
1990s, the contemporary practice of expulsion was still
in its infancy, the pertinent law in asylum politics having
been passed only in December of 1994; the same year, the
green light was given to build these new facilities. This had
implications for the architecture of the detention prison.
As the then-director of the prison, Rico Vincenz, reflected
at the time, it was built “before anyone really knew what
deportation detention was.” Quoted in Monique Ligtenberg,
“Endstation Ausschaffungsgefängnis,” in Flughafen Kloten:
Anatomie eines komplizierten Ortes, Aether Verlag, 2018,
p. H7. See this article for an interesting study on the in-
terlacing of discourses around drug policies and migration
in the mid-1990s which, she argues, led to the building
of the deportation prison. https://aether.ethz.ch/ausga-
be/flughafen-kloten-anatomie-eines-komplizierten-ortes/
endstation-ausschaffungsgefaengnis/, accessed July 2010.
Accordingly, the sleeping quarters are cells that could be
locked at night, the windows barred, the doors had secu-
rity systems installed, and the premises were under cons-
tant surveillance. This prison architecture, based on tradi-
tional assumptions about how to treat criminals, continues
to define the lives of refugees who await expulsion today,
more than twenty-five years later.
10.2478/kwg-2018-0016 | 3. Jahrgang 2018 Heft 2: 63–85
context as the third revision of the Swiss Auslän-
dergesetz, or law on foreign nationals.23 Both the
law and the prison were a result, at least indi-
rectly, of the open drug scene that had, at the
time, grown up in some of Switzerland’s larger
cities. In Zurich it had produced a thriving, but
for many deadly, “milieu” in the Letten neigh-
bourhood, an area along the banks of the River
Limmat, located not far downstream from the
once notorious needle park at Platzspitz, itself
closed by police order in 1992. Hence the nick-
name given the proposed law by some of the
parliamentarians who opposed it: Lex Letten. By
1993 public sentiment was at a high pitch, not
only in Zurich itself but throughout the country,
stoked by intense media coverage which, as his-
torian Monique Ligtenberg shows, had, under the
deft tutelage of the right-wing parties24, gradually
shifted from a story about those taking drugs to
those dealing them, many of whom came from
outside of Switzerland, some of them asylum
seekers.25 The problem had thus mutated in the
minds of many from a drug problem into an Aus-
länderproblem, a problem with foreign nationals.
The perception that a presumed threat to a coun-
try’s body politic emanates from foreigners is
common to many nations; in Switzerland this
fear manifested itself periodically throughout the
20th century, for instance in fears of Verjudung,
or “Jewification”, in the 1930s and 1940s, and
in concerns about Überfremdung, or “over-for-
eignization”, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a
narrative fuelled by a marked increase of mainly
Italian guest workers, which in turn inspired
the “Schwarzenbach-Initiative”, which proposed
delimiting migration in a popular vote in June of
23  So-called Ausschaffungshaft, detention for forced ex-
pulsion, for rejected asylum seekers was first introduced
on June 20, 1986 by parliament. While people could be
detained by the police for up to 48 hours under this regu-
lation, any detention past 48 hours had to be confirmed by
a judge, and under no circumstances could detention last
longer than 30 days. See https://www.bger.ch/files/live/
sites/bger/files/pdf/de/bericht_hugi_yar_version_inter-
net.pdf, p. 3. accessed January 15, 2019.
24  These included principally the far-right Swiss Demo-
crats and the Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP) or Swiss
People’s Party.
25  Ligtenberg “Endstation Ausschaffungsgefängnis,”
p.  H7., https://aether.ethz.ch/ausgabe/flughafen-kloten-
anatomie-eines-komplizierten-ortes/endstation-ausschaf-
fungsgefaengnis/, accessed July 2018.
Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift - 1/2018
1970.26 By the early 1990s, questions revolving
around Swiss Ausländerpolitik had, as elsewhere,
become a central element of the populist plat-
form. The problem of drug abuse in the 1990s,
twinned in the imaginary with the perceived
threat of foreigners, had parts of the country
in what some considered a state of emergency.
This, in turn, put enormous pressure on politi-
cians and the government to create legal instru-
ments that promised quick solutions. The result of
this pressure was indeed a cascade of measures,
not, however, in the area of drug policy, as might
have been expected, but rather in laws govern-
ing foreign nationals, beginning with the Federal
Act on Coercive Measures mentioned above27 and
the decisions to build deportation centres, includ-
ing the deportation prison at the Zurich airport,
and to implement forced deportations on special
flights. A narrative slippage had thus occurred,
which resulted in legal measures papering over
a more complex social malaise: rather than
addressing the deeper rooted domestic problems
at the heart of the drug scene, such as alienation,
a hidden class system and the very real disease
of addiction, the politicians focused instead on
the usual suspects, “delinquent” foreigners, who
had neither a voice nor a vote, and whose expul-
sion was made to sound like the logical solution.
26  For a recent recap of this initiative, see for instance https://
www.nzz.ch/schweiz/schweizer-geschichte/als-james-
s c h w a r z e n b a c h - d i e - a u s l a e n d e r p o l i t i k- e n t d e c k t e -
1.18430680, accessed January 10, 2019.
27  In particular, the law was to introduce four new artic-
les: 13a, which states that, during the deliberations on a
request for asylum, a person can be held in so-called Vor-
bereitungshaft, or preparatory detention, for up to three
months if he or she has committed infractions against the
law; 13b, which states that, if a request for asylum is de-
nied, he or she can be detained for up to 12 months in
so-called Ausschaffungshaft or detention for expulsion in
cases in which it is feared that the asylum seeker will resist
implementation; 13c, which states that the deportation is
to be ordered by an official of a canton, to be confirmed
no more than 96 hours later by a judge; and 13e, which
states that foreigners without proper papers can be denied
entry to, or may be forced to exit from, particular areas by
cantonal officials if they disturb or threaten security and
order. Furthermore, youths from the age of 15 can be trea-
ted as adults, and the police can raid apartments without a
warrant if they suspected the presence of “illegal refugees”
or the papers of “illegal refugees”. See Art. 69-71, Schwei-
zerisches Ausländergesetz; see also https://www.bger.
ch/files/live/sites/bger/files/pdf/de/bericht_hugi_yar_ver-
sion_internet.pdf, accessed January, 2019.
75
The law on coercive measures was initiated by
the then-Federal Councilor and Minister of Justice
Arnold Koller in late 1993 as the third revision to
the asylum law, and was the first to introduce a
number of calibrated measures of forced deten-
tion for asylum seekers and foreigners not in
possession of the requisite papers. It was taken
up in parliamentary debate in December of 1993
as part of an accelerated legislative procedure.
The Federal Council issued its Botschaft, or offi-
cial proclamation to parliament, on December 22,
1993, with a draft of the new law for consultation
and revision in March of 1994, with the following
statement:
Even though the number of asylum seekers decreased
markedly last year and 1993 has not seen an exces-
sive increase, the topic of asylum remains a political
issue of the first order. The broad public has for quite
some time now been preoccupied with the problem
of asylum seekers in the drug scene who have dealt
drugs under protection of the asylum law. The abuse
of the right to hospitality, which Switzerland grants
those who are politically persecuted, by a minority of
delinquent foreigners, and the problems presented to
officials in the implementation of deportation proce-
dures, even of those asylum seekers and foreigners
who were rejected legally, have increasingly led to
calls for tightened legal measures.28
And further:
In the conviction that we must confront abuse reso-
lutely, and that we should advance the fight against
criminality in the area of asylum and foreigners using
all legally admissible and suitable means, the propos-
als worked up by the expert commission will be sep-
arated from the regular revision of the AVB (Bundes-
beschluss über das Asylverfahren [Federal Decision on
the Asylum Process]) and introduced in an accelerated
legal proceeding. This will likely allow us to enforce the
measures by July 1, 1994.29
Striking in this context is that a relatively con-
tained situation—the drug scene in a few Swiss
cities—had not only been re-conceptualised, in
the media of the time, as a problem having to
do with foreigners, rather than with local drug
28  Botschaft zum Bundesgesetz über Zwangsmassnahmen
im Ausländerrecht, in 4th Bundesblatt, 46. Jahrgang, Band
1, p. 306, translation mine: https://www.amtsdruckschrif-
ten.bar.admin.ch/viewOrigDoc.do?id=10052908 accessed
July 1, 2018.
29  Ibid, p. 1, translation mine.
76
policies or domestic issues, but that, due to this
narrative shift, the drug crisis in Zurich was actu-
ally steering legislative proceedings in the area of
foreign nationals.
The law’s ambiguities and potential threat to
principles of human rights did not elude the mem-
bers of parliament, mainly on the left, who were
called upon to consult on it in the spring parlia-
mentary session of 1994, while those on the right
generally agreed with its premises.30 Cécile Bühl-
mann of the Green Party in Lucerne, for instance,
pointed to the massive increase in the amount
of time people could be detained under the new
law: under the existing law, refugees who had
been denied asylum could be detained for up to
30 days if there were concerns that they might
go into hiding, while the new law allowed for pre-
paratory detention of up to three months, seam-
lessly followed by deportation detention of up to
six months, which could be extended for another
six months—an increase of 14 months compared
to the previous law. “That’s how long people
who have committed no crime under our penal
law can be deprived of their freedom! ... Forci-
ble detention,” Bühlmann concluded, “is a drastic
encroachment upon the rights of individuals, and
for this reason we need to be extremely careful
in this area.”31 Bühlmann also noted the fact that
it was the so-called Fremdenpolizei, or foreign-
ers’ police, and not a judge, who could determine
this detention, judges only being required to con-
firm the decision a posteriori.32 Paul Rechsteiner,
Social Democrat and then-President of the Swiss
Federation of Trade Unions, criticised the pro-
posed law as an example of a new mode in law-
making, in which politics is put under pressure
by media campaigns orchestrated by the right,
and then tries to alleviate that pressure by cre-
ating a proposal for a new law, “which severely
limits the human rights of people with a foreign
nationality … as though the nasty foreigners were
30  For an overview of the parties represented in the Swiss
Parliament, see https://www.parlament.ch/en/organe/
groups/parties-in-parliament, accessed January 20, 2018.
31  https://www.amtsdruckschriften.bar.admin.ch/view
OrigDoc/20023755.pdf?ID=20023755, p. 100, accessed
July 15, 2018, translation mine.
32  https://www.amtsdruckschriften.bar.admin.ch/view
OrigDoc/20023755.pdf?ID=20023755, p. 103, accessed
July 15, 2018, translation mine.
10.2478/kwg-2018-0016 | 3. Jahrgang 2018 Heft 2: 63–85
to blame for the drug misery in Zürich”.33 In the
meantime, Rechsteiner continued, “the question
of whether the coercion law does not abet racism,
governmentally decreed racism, is not a topic of
discussion, at least not an official one.”34 Others,
like the Social Democrat Francois Borel from Neu-
châtel, observed that the law fails to distinguish
between people who do not possess the right
kind of papers, and those who are “delinquent”,
thus erasing the difference among those foreign-
ers who merely lack papers, those who commit
criminal acts, and all other foreigners. “Certainly,”
he said,
tourists and asylum seekers who—and here I cite the
law—‘do not possess a regularresidence permit’ are
not illegal because of it. On the other hand, to put
those one thinks are drug dealers in the same boat
as those one imagines to be too frightened to return
to their country to accept a decision of expulsion from
our authorities is not admissible. In both cases, drugs
or the refusal of expulsion, they risk preventative
imprisonment without having committed any crimes.35
Moreover, Borel continued, “the problem in Zurich
is a management problem. We have a penal law
and an administrative law, both of which could be
applied to resolve acute problems.”36 Parliamen-
tarians on the right, in the meantime, spoke up in
favour of the law, and Rudolf Keller, a member of
the right-wing Swiss Democrats, thanked Federal
Councillor Koller—who was not amused—for his
efforts at the end of the four-day deliberation:
Despite the watering down of the law, I thank you,
Mr  Federal Councillor, for proposing the law in this
form, among other things, due to the pressure the
Swiss Democrats have exerted over years.37
33  https://www.amtsdruckschriften.bar.admin.ch/view
OrigDoc/20023754.pdf?ID=20023754, p. 80, accessed July 15,
2018, translation mine.
34  https://www.amtsdruckschriften.bar.admin.ch/view
OrigDoc/20023754.pdf?ID=20023754, p. 80, accessed July 15,
2018, translation mine.
35  https://www.amtsdruckschriften.bar.admin.ch/view
OrigDoc/20023754.pdf?ID=20023754, p. 78, accessed July 15,
2018, translation mine.
36  https://www.amtsdruckschriften.bar.admin.ch/view
OrigDoc/20023754.pdf?ID=20023754, p. 78, accessed July 15,
2018, translation mine.
37  https://www.amtsdruckschriften.bar.admin.ch/view
OrigDoc/20023758.pdf?ID=20023758, p. 153, translation
mine.
Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift - 1/2018
In the end, the law passed parliament with a two-
thirds majority. When it came before the people
in December of 1994, an overwhelming 72% of
voters approved it, and it went into force in Feb-
ruary of 1995.38
A number of points are worth stressing: first
of all, as suggested by Rechsteiner, the category
of “race”, and with it racism, is central, albeit typ-
ically unarticulated, in the discourse surrounding
refugees and asylum in Switzerland and else-
where. For many in Switzerland today, and even
more so in the 1990s, “race” remains a non-exist-
ent social category, even against the background
of the well-established implications of colonial-
ism. The fact that Switzerland had for a long time
been thought to have had little involvement with
the colonialist project, and had therefore been
sheltered from the global, economic and ethical
consequences of post-colonialism, has allowed
many to believe that racialised hierarchies do
not exist in Swiss society.39 Secondly, the law on
coercive measures appears to have arisen as a
partial answer to a very specific socio-cultural
problem: the open drug scene in individual Swiss
cities. That drug scene, however, was only mar-
ginally related to the situation of asylum seekers
in Switzerland. In that sense, the law might be
read more as a diagnostic than as a corrective
tool, a reading that reveals multiple layers of what
was at stake culturally at that moment in time:
38  In a fourth revision of the Asylum law of 2006, the
maximal time of incarceration was doubled from 12 months
to 24 months with the addition of the so-called Durchset-
zungshaft, also known as Beugehaft, or coercive deten-
tion, although when Switzerland entered the Schengen
area, it was forced to reduce the maximal time of incarcer-
ation to 18 months to accord with the EU policy. Depending
on the circumstances in the home countries of refugees,
the deportation itself at times also goes against the Swiss
constitution, article 25, which reads: “Refugees may not
be deported or extradited to a state where they are perse-
cuted; and no one may be deported to a state where they
are threatened by torture, or any other kind of cruel or
inhumane treatment or punishment.” (Translation mine.)
39  See Purtschert, Patricia, Barbara Lüthi and Frances-
ca Falk (eds) (2012), Postkoloniale Schweiz: Formen und
Folgen eines Kolonialismus ohne Kolonien (Bielefeld: Tran-
script). See also Michel, Noémi, and Manuela Honegger
(2010) ‘Thinking Whiteness in French and Swiss Cyberspac-
es’, Social Politics, 17 (4): 423–49; Lavanchy, Anne (2013b)
‘L’amour aux services de l’état civil: Régulations institution-
nelles de l’intimité et fabrique de la ressemblance nationale
en Suisse’, Migration sociétés, 25 (150): 61–94.
77
namely, a perceived threat to order and security,
but also to a hitherto stable national identity.
The drug crisis, meanwhile, however distress-
ing, did not adequately explain the perceived
threat to national identity. Recall that Switzer-
land in the 1990s faced more than an epidemic of
drug-related deaths; its very self-understanding
as a nation was being destabilised by the begin-
ning of a re-evaluation of Switzerland’s role dur-
ing World War II, in particular, the assessment
of its restrictive refugee policies with regard to
Jewish refugees and the handling of dormant
bank accounts.40 Hence, while it was the open
drug scene that was addressed in the 1995 law
on coercive measures, the cultural processes
driving this reckoning with the past provided a
further, and in many ways more resonant, motor
for the symbolic tightening of the borders. From
a narrative point of view, we might think of the
early 1990s as a battlefield of shifting stories
about the nation and about national identity, on
which the more traditional telling of the effective-
ness of Swiss resistance during the war, and the
country’s humanitarian readiness to help those in
need, was being challenged by narratives about
self-serving negotiations with the Third Reich,
and about the fateful decisions to close its bor-
ders to Jewish refugees on August 13, 1942—a
decision driven by a wide-spread anti-Semitism
within the government that cost many thousand
Jewish refugees their lives.41
40  This re-evaluation would culminate in an official apol-
ogy by the then-President of the Federal Council, Kaspar
Villiger, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the end
of World War II in 1995. This apology in turn would be fol-
lowed by the creation of the Volcker Commission in 1996
to investigate the dormant accounts of Jews persecuted
during WWII, for which the two banks UBS and Credit Su-
isse ended up paying a settlement of 1.25 billion dollars in
1998. It also led to the creation of the Bergier Commis-
sion, also in 1996, to investigate assets, economic rela-
tions, arms production and the situation of Jewish refugees
during WWII. All three of these events—the public apology,
the formation of the Volcker commission and the creation
of the Bergier commission—were met with consternation
by the right wing of the government and broad swaths of
the population. In other words, the open drug scene and
the acts of coming to terms with the past presented for
many a threat to what it meant to be Swiss.
41  See in particular volume 17 of the so-called Bergier
Report, “Switzerland and the refugees during National So-
cialism”, published in 2002: https://www.uek.ch/en/_syn-
these.htm, accessed January 2019.
78
The winners of this battle of narratives in the
1990s were certain politicians, the proposed law
itself, and a readership willing to accept the story
that law had spun. The national imaginary—the
stories that had shaped Switzerland in the post-
war era, and that were being stirred up at the
time—helped make the legal story both believa-
ble and desirable. As Jerome Bruner and Anthony
Amsterdam note,
reasoning within the law depends not only on spe-
cific states of facts, but also upon the notion of things
generally. […] However we conceive of them, they are
grounded in what our culture designates as mattering.
And what does and doesn’t matter to a country can be
traced back though the country’s stories, its genres
and its enduring myths.42
In this particular case, the myth of the danger-
ous foreigner mattered more than the myth of
the humanitarian state, even as—or precisely
because—that dangerous foreigner, in the imag-
inary figure of “the Jew”, kept out of the country
some fifty years previously, was coming back to
haunt the carefully constructed story of Swiss
identity forged after the war.
The voices muted entirely by this process,
then as now, are those of the actual foreigners in
question, rejected asylum seekers by definition
without recourse to a safe haven. These are the
refugees whose stories of persecution accorded
neither with the inflexible plot line sought by the
officials deciding on asylum protection, nor with
the definition of refugees laid out in the 1951 Con-
vention Relating to the Status of Refugees and
the 1967 Protocol that followed. In these texts,
the UN defines the refugee as someone who has
a “well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of
race, religion, nationality, membership of a par-
ticular social group or political opinion.”43 As Alex-
ander Betts and Paul Collier argue, this definition
goes back to a US American narrative constructed
in the early 1950s, at the height of the Cold War,
and tailored to the situation of would-be defec-
42  Amsterdam, Anthony and Jerome Bruner, Minding the
Law, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, p. 111 (empha-
sis in the original).
43  See the UNHCR text of the 1951 Convention Relating
to the Status of Refugees, https://www.unhcr.org/3b-
66c2aa10, accessed January 7, 2019.
10.2478/kwg-2018-0016 | 3. Jahrgang 2018 Heft 2: 63–85
tors behind the Iron Curtain.44 Today’s refugees,
who are often fleeing civil wars, abject poverty or
environmental crises, but who are not victims of
racial, religious or other forms of personal per-
secution, may have good reason to leave their
homes, but no longer fit the Cold War definition of
a refugee; their stories, accordingly, do not ring
true. The stateless foreigners in this particular
Swiss legal story of coercive measures are not
deemed worthy of refugee status based on their
particular stories. Rather, they are rendered ille-
gitimate and muted, homines sacri, a threat to
civil society. Set up in this manner by the legal
and cultural narratives prevailing at the time
of the law’s ratification, the coercive measures
planned for the deportation of rejected asylum
seekers seem less draconian; the human rights
violation the law constitutes seems justified by
its end, which is to shape a legal instrument to
remove undesirables and restore safety to the
streets of Switzerland.
How can this scenario be thought with Agam-
bens notion of the state of emergency? While
the “war on drugs”, which led to the legislation’s
drafting in 1995, could not officially be declared
a national state of emergency along the lines of
Agamben’s formulation, because only a few cit-
ies were affected by it; that law was nonetheless
introduced as an accelerated legislative proce-
dure out of sync with the ordinary cycle of revi-
sions to the law on foreigners. In other words,
a state of exception was invoked not formally,
but circumstantially, and presented as such
to the public in populist rhetoric in the form of
ads and media coverage before the vote on the
law on coercion was held. The official legitima-
tion for the law derived from the argument that
foreigners and asylum seekers were endanger-
ing national order and security; a more layered
reading of the cultural environment in the early to
mid-1990s suggests that the pressure to create
coercive measures was based more urgently on
the sense that Switzerland’s national identity was
under siege by a past coming back to haunt it.
This perceived endangerment, on both the literal
and the symbolic levels, was then translated into
some of the more extreme measures foreseen by
44  Betts, Alexander and Paul Collier, Refuge: Transform-
ing a Broken Refugee System, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2017.
Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift - 1/2018
the law to impose order by carving up, delimit-
ing and transforming the spaces foreigners, per-
ceived as dangerous, could inhabit. This took the
form of a massive increase of time in detention
for rejected asylum seekers to ensure the smooth
expulsion from the national space; of the institu-
tion of special flights; of the banning of suspected
drug dealers with foreign nationalities from, or
their containment within, certain areas; and of
the diminishment of the role of judges and law-
yers in the various processes, and the concomi-
tant augmentation of the role of administrators.
Each of these strategies resulted in a decrease of
recourse to the law for those affected, effectively
stripping rejected refugees of their subjecthood
under the law, and turning them into homines
sacri.
5 Le Vol Spécial: Screening
Bare Life
Le vol spécial, made almost twenty years after
the 1995 law on coercive measures was first
passed, shows the practical consequences of
that law in daily life at the Centre Frambois, near
Geneva, one of 28 so-called Ausschaffungsze-
ntren, or deportation sites, in Switzerland. The
documentary translates the dry legal text of the
coercive measures, which suspend the right to
residency, the ability to move around freely and
to have one’s story heard, into a visual language
demonstrating what it means when people are
forced to move between zoe, bare life, and bios,
political life. Revolving around the conditions of
incarceration and the inmates’ stories, the film
evokes dichotomies of surveillance and revela-
tion, systemic power hierarchies, human rights
and the mechanisms of the expulsion narrative.
In so doing, Le vol spécial helps to understand
often hidden aspects of today’s asylum regime
and offers a commentary on the Swiss institution
of forced deportation from the inside out. It also
proposes a practical application of Agamben’s
notions of sovereign power and bare life.45 The
45  Critics of Agamben point out that in his ambitious pro-
ject of establishing a sweeping socio-political theory of all
the Western modes of governance over the centuries, he
has failed to take account of context-specific, essentializ-
79
20 to 25 inhabitants of the Centre Frambois are
all men; those portrayed in the film are mainly
from African countries, and two from Kosovo.
The inmates are there for one reason alone: to
be forcibly sent back to their native countries
at the end of the administrative process that
will wrap up their individual cases. They are all
either asylum seekers whose asylum requests
have been rejected by the Swiss administra-
tion, or who have spent time in Switzerland as
sans-papiers, people lacking official documenta-
tion, who either never applied for asylum or who
went underground after being rejected, and were
subsequently picked up by the police. All the indi-
viduals, furthermore, have been detained without
a court conviction, many following an adminis-
trative process that was confirmed only after the
fact by a judge.46
ing structures that produce bare life on the basis of identity
markers such as gender, class, ability and race, and that
he has failed to look closely at the variety of forms bare life
can take within the context of different political regimes.
Taking the situation of the “welfare mother” in the United
States as her example, political theorist Anna-Marie Smith,
for instance, points out that by adducing only the very ex-
treme cases—the inmates in Nazi concentration camps
or the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay—and by proposing
a sweeping, ahistorical theory, Agamben “completely fails
to grasp the centrality of gender to the biopolitical pro-
ject of producing bare life.” See Anna Marie Smith, “Neo-
eugenics: A Feminist Critique of Agamben.” Occasion: In-
terdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities v. 2 (December
20, 2010), http://occasion.stanford.edu/node/59, 2–9, ac-
cessed June 2018.
Judith Butler, in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourn-
ing and Violence, similarly critiques the lack of specifici-
ty in Agamben’s conceptualization of power, writing that
the broad claim that we are all potentially homines sacri
tells us very little about how power in fact operates, “how
sovereignty … works by differentiating populations on
the basis of ethnicity and race…” In other words, Butler
is much more interested in the nuances of what makes
life liveable (and mournable). Her idea of the “precarious
body”, in this sense, is cultural and political—focused on
the things we do to survive, the performances we give so
as to adhere to the social protocols of race, sexuality, eth-
nicity and ability. Agamben’s arguments about “bare life”,
by contrast, are legal—his interests are driven by a will
to critique and overcome the law and its function within
the sovereign state. See Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The
Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Routledge,
2004, 67–68.
46  See https://www.bger.ch/files/live/sites/bger/files/pdf/
de/bericht_hugi_yar_version_internet.pdf, accessed Janu-
ary 15, 2019.
80
The documentary begins with an introduction
to Ragip, a man from Kosovo who had worked in
Switzerland for 22 years as a seasonal worker.
He and his family are classified as sans-papiers,
without rights to residency. The film’s opening
sequence captures the moment in which Ragip
is told about his imminent deportation, and the
viewer learns what in fact constitutes a special
flight.47 We learn not only of the hopeless situa-
tion of Ragip, and by extension of all the inmates
at Frambois, and the forced choices they are pre-
sented with by the logic of deportations: either
go voluntarily, with some dignity, or involuntarily,
on a special flight, bound up and accompanied
by police. By casting us into an intimate setting
with Ragip and his guard—an intimacy empha-
sised by the camera’s mid-level close-up—this
first scene of Le vol spécial also brings into focus
the representational anxieties that beset the doc-
umentation of bare life. Melgar, together with
his camera crew, spent some nine months in the
centre in 2010, filming several hundred hours
of footage. The filmmaker and the crew remain
entirely invisible, the only narrative we can dis-
cern shaped in the editing process, through the
stories told by those filmed, and the events that
unfold during the filming itself. With this radical
omnipresence of the visual recording, twinned
by the total absence of narrative voice-over, the
documentary achieves a seeming indifference to
the camera on the part of those filmed, which
translates into an equivalent lack of awareness,
on the part of the viewer, of the way the story
itself is shaped. This indifference renders the
filmmaker, and the power of the cinematic gaze,
largely invisible, and as viewers, we feel at times
as though we are watching through surveillance
cameras, voyeur-like. This documentary style
raises a number of questions: What does it mean
for refugees and asylum seekers to be filmed this
way during a vulnerable, life-altering situation?
Is this an appropriation and exploitation of some-
one’s story, which, however well-intentioned,
colludes with some of the bio-political technolo-
gies used to further marginalise refugees? What
does it mean for the filmmaker and his team
to remain invisible, with their—and our—power
47  See Fernand Melgar, Le vol spécial on vimeo: https://
vimeo.com/111191661, 00:18-5:51, accessed February 1,
2019.
10.2478/kwg-2018-0016 | 3. Jahrgang 2018 Heft 2: 63–85
removed from the visual equation? And finally:
is the screening of the inhabitants and their sto-
ries a further purloining of rights, or is it, as Mel-
gar would have it, a chance for the inmates at
Frambois to have a voice, and to be able to speak
about the conditions of their incarceration and
deportations to one another, to the guards, and
to a larger public long after they have dropped
out of the official narrative cycle?
The portrayal of bare life, as art historian T.J.
Demos argues in his book The Migrant Image, is
ethically complex:
The documentary representation, when it does take on
a relation to bare life, often serves the interests of the
state, according to which photography, positioned in
ever-new and expanding surveillance systems, oper-
ates as judicial and forensic evidence wherein ‘truth’
and ‘evidence’ live on through their continual institu-
tional and legal validation. Indeed the documentation
of bare life, it appears, is closely aligned to the exer-
cise of biopower.48
Given this use of the documentary form to work
against those who are marginalised, it is an
interesting move by Melgar to use the veracity
claims that usually inhere in the genre of the
documentary to support, for once, the testimo-
nial efforts of the marginalised, in this case the
rejected asylum seekers. Le vol spécial uses the
documentary form, traditionally a tool of the
oppressor, to actually reveal the kind of oppres-
sion and violence experienced by the inmates
of these centres, and to give them a voice that
most homines sacri do not possess. Indeed, the
documentary depiction of the ever-shifting legal
decisions that swirl around these men’s lives and
can abruptly change their fates also fleshes out
Agamben’s rather vague description of “the indis-
tinction between outside and inside, exclusion
and inclusion” quoted above and renders the doc-
umentary narrative a potent political tool.49
The politics of narrative takes centre stage in
Le vol spécial: in the depiction of the inmate’s
stories, in the stories to which the inmates refer,
in the stories told by the guards and care-givers,
as well as in the significance of special flights as a
story in the larger Swiss cultural realm. In terms
48  T. J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics
of Documentary During Global Crisis, Combined Academic
Publication, 2013, p. 99.
49  Agamben, Homo Sacer, 27
Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift - 1/2018
of the inmate’s stories, one striking feature of
the documentary is that, while we get to see the
would-be refugees in unguarded moments and
hear parts of their stories, these are often trun-
cated or silenced or interrupted by those around
them. The police and care-takers who speak to
them most often cut them off when they try to
recount their reasons for coming to Switzerland,
for not wanting, or not being able, to go back to
their countries of origin, or for wanting to stay in
Switzerland. Each level of bureaucrat or police-
man or care-giver has a different, carefully cir-
cumscribed role: to care for the physical well-be-
ing of the inmates in the centre and to make sure
transitions are smooth and nerves are calmed; to
accompany those to be deported to the airport;
to shackle them; to deport them; but not to hear
or evaluate or judge their stories anew once a
decision has been handed down.
In other words, the refugees in deportation
centres are done telling stories as far as those in
charge are concerned, their initial attempts when
they first arrived having been found to be illegit-
imate, or unauthentic; in any case, not to meet
the definitional standard of a refugee deemed
worthy of asylum. What the documentary shows
us very eloquently, then, is that the homo sacer
is essentially rendered mute, story-less, deprived
of the most basic human right to tell a story,
and hence shape a life. In fact, being story-less
can be understood as a central feature of bare
life; inherent in the production of bare life is the
removal of individuals from the story-telling cycle
that might change their future. What happens to
the ability to tell stories in this Swiss “zone of
indistinction” is perhaps the fundamental narra-
tive of this documentary. While the documentary
might be accused of purloining the images of
the prisoners, of taking their stories to be shown
to unseen audiences across Switzerland and
beyond, it serves at the same time as a vehicle to
restore the ability to tell these stories. Insofar as
the ability to tell stories, to have a voice and to
enjoy freedom of expression are defining features
of citizenship, Le vol spécial attempts to repair
the status of the sacred man to that of man, and
to defy the power of the sovereign to silence him.
In that sense, Le vol spécial also adds a much-
needed corrective to the story Switzerland tells
about its own status as a humanitarian nation.
81
The documentary also shows a clear under-
standing on the part of the inmates of the cultural
mechanisms and the racist narratives that put
them there. Take for instance a scene that fea-
tures a conversation between some of the inmates
at Frambois and one of their guards, Denis.50 The
quality of the scene is intimate, underlining not
only the close quarters, but also the relations of
confidence between guard and inmate, even in
discussing the system that forces them into the
role of oppressed and oppressor and which sug-
gests that, to a certain degree, both sides are
victims of the coercion the law legitimises. It also
shows that everyone is quite aware of how the
system works publicly to disenfranchise foreign-
ers politically—to paraphrase one of the inmates,
people can be locked away for up to 24 months,
until they go crazy and can be pronounced dan-
gerous to society. To put it somewhat differently,
their discussion traces the intersection of sover-
eign power with modern techniques for produc-
ing the biopolitical body. This scene invokes the
SVP’s infamous sheep poster, used in its Initiative
für die Ausschaffung krimineller Ausländer,51 a bill
calling for the expulsion of “criminal” foreigners:
“When I saw Swiss planes passing over my head
when I was eight I thought it was a peaceful coun-
try, but once you’re here reality is totally differ-
ent,” he says and continues: “When I came here,
I asked my brother: who are the black sheep?
He said: ‘It’s people, it’s us.’ To stigmatise us.”52
The inmate’s remark positions the documentary
within the larger panoply of political representa-
tional strategies in the area of asylum seekers
and refugees in Switzerland.53 It also moves the
narrative told within the context of detention into
the context of those told outside, preparing the
viewer for a dramatic clash of narratives—the
50  Ibid, 25:50-28:41.
51  The poster shows four white sheep on a stylised map of
Switzerland kicking out a black sheep. For an image of the
sheep poster and a brief commentary in the mainstream
press on how it is being recycled, see https://www.tag-
esanzeiger.ch/schweiz/Das-SVPSchaf-reist-um-die-Welt/
story/24832616, accessed January 15, 2019.
52  Fernand Melgar, Le vol spécial, 28:07-28:17 https://
vimeo.com/111191661, accessed August 31, 2018.
53  For an explanation of this initiative, please see the of-
ficial federal administrative site: https://www.bk.admin.
ch/ch/d/pore/vi/vis357t.html, accessed January 2019. This
initiative was approved by 52.9% of the Swiss voting public
on 28 November, 2010.
82
narrative of the sacred man closed off in Fram-
bois, the soothing narratives told within the cen-
tre to enable smooth operations, and the narra-
tive told by the Swiss media against the story of
a humanitarian Switzerland.
The scene begins in an office, where the
director of the centre informs two of the inmates,
Emmanuel and Julius, that their special flight
to Nigeria is to take place that very afternoon.
We watch Emmanuel and Julius react with dig-
nity to the news, pack up their belongings, hug
the director and the guards, get in a bus accom-
panied by police, and turn the final bend in the
road, headed for the airport prison in Zurich,
where they will be prepared for the special flight.
As viewers, we are also told that no cameras are
allowed in the prison in Zurich, and that this will
be our final encounter with these two inmates.
The whole process is enveloped in a calm and
calming story on the part of the director. “Today
is the day of your departure,” he announces to
them, and continues:
We are very sorry to see you go, but I think this is a
project for you. It’s better that this has an end. We
wish you the best of luck for what comes, because you
are good men and deserve it. … First you’ll be driven
to Lausanne, then in Zurich you will be chained up, it’s
a special flight. It’ll go well.54
It is a story that puts a civil stamp on the inherent
violence of the practice of deportation; one that
eases the task of the director, to run a humane
operation and send his inmates to an uncertain
future. As a viewer, it is comforting to see the
way this is handled, without outbursts or protests
on the part of the prisoners, the social contract
built up between director, guards and inmates
smoothing over the inherent hierarchy of power
and normalising the violence lurking just below
the surface of the deportation centre.
Into this controlled narrative bursts the
national news broadcast in the very next scene,
with images of Emmanuel and Julius flashing
across the screen as the newscaster announces
the death of Joseph Ndukaku Chiakwa, slated
for the same special flight headed for Nigeria as
Emanuel and Julius had been.55 The news reporter
gives a brief account of how special flights are
54  Melgar, Le vol spécial, 1:27:42-1:30:42
55  Melgar, Le vol spécial, 1:30.42-1:31:40
10.2478/kwg-2018-0016 | 3. Jahrgang 2018 Heft 2: 63–85
handled, showing the straps and masks used to
contain the prisoners, and offering a glimpse of
a prisoner, strapped into a chair, as he is car-
ried onto the airplane. Gone is the credibility of
the centre’s director and care-givers, who have
insisted throughout that—often, contrary to the
inmate’s own fears—all is for the best, and that
the dignity of the people being deported is guar-
anteed; gone too is our confidence in the insti-
tution of the special flight. The soothing assur-
ances, it turns out, are a fiction the director and
care-givers rely on to be able to do their job.56 It
is part of a discourse through which the degrad-
ing events at the centre can be normalised and
humanised. In that sense, the narrative tug-of-
war in Frambois is revealed as a microcosm of
the narrative tug-of-war on the national level,
in which the story of humanitarian benevolence
competes with that inscribed in inhumane asylum
practices.
This moment also confronts us with the mul-
ti-layered power differentials inherent in asylum
politics. At the same time as we see the clash
of framing conventions between the official
news story and the centre’s story concerning the
deportation practice, one speaking truth to the
other, we also witness the breakdown of the dis-
cursive harmony between the inmates and their
guards: there can be no talk of dignity, calm and
respect at this point, and all the sincere prom-
ises of the guards and the director are suddenly
revealed as part of a rote human rights discourse
with little meaning or basis in truth. The director’s
statement, that he will intervene with the pres-
ident of the foundation that runs the deporta-
tion centre to demand humane treatment for his
inmates, reveals the shadowy outlines of a much
larger power apparatus propelling the institution
of forced deportation, and rendering those who
implement the system mere cogs in a machine.
The director’s statement to the assembled
inmates, moreover, that he is no longer proud to
be a Swiss, contains a rather stale definition of
Swiss identity dependent on ideals of humanitar-
ianism that have slowly crumbled, over the last
56  See Fernand Melgar’s 2013 follow-up video to Le vol
spécial, entitled The world is like this, in which he follows
five of the protagonists in their post-deportation lives in
Kosovo, Senegal, Gambia and Cameroon: https://vimeo.
com/109008609, accessed January 2019.
Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift - 1/2018
two decades, under the weight of the adminis-
trative and legal proceedings of which he is a
part. The inmates’ narratives at this moment are
the ones that offer most clarity. “If it had been
a Swiss who died yesterday,” Ebrima, one of the
men assembled says, “all hell would have bro-
ken loose. But because it was an African, nothing
much will happen.” And Abdoul adds: “Because
we are foreigners, we are more exposed than
others. To deport someone, it is not necessary
to kill them.” To the care-giver Denis’s fervent
assurances that things cannot go on and will cer-
tainly change because of this death, he retorts:
We just came to find a better future here. Why?
Because you came to Africa and destroyed everything,
leaving wars behind. So we come here to seek a better
life, because we’re human beings like you. But you
don’t want to accept us here, so sooner or later we will
go back. But nothing will change here.57
What Abdoul gets wrong here is that he is not,
in fact, considered a human being like Denis,
because, unlike Denis, he does not hold Swiss
nationality. He does not possess, to use Hanna
Arendt’s famous phrase, “the right to have
rights”,58 which paradoxically tends to be with-
drawn at the moment the need for rights is at its
greatest, namely when a person loses national
57  Melgar. Le vol spécial, 1:33:32-1:35:50, accessed Jan-
uary 15, 2019.
58  Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New
York: Harcourt, Brace Yovanovich, (1951) 1968, p. 177.
The full quotation from which the phrase is taken appears
in Arendt’s discussion and reads as follows: “Something
much more fundamental than freedom and justice, which
are rights of citizens, is at stake when belonging to a com-
munity into which one is born is no longer a matter of
course and not belonging is no longer a matter of choice, or
when one is placed in a situation where, unless he commits
a crime, his treatment by others does not depend on what
he does or does not do. This extremity, and nothing else,
is the situation of people deprived of human rights. They
are deprived, not of the right to freedom but of the right
to action; not of the right to think whatever they please,
but of the right to opinion. Privileges in some cases, injus-
tices in most, blessings and doom are meted out to them
according to accident and without any relation whatsoever
to what they do, did, or may do. We become aware of the
existence of a right to have rights (and that means to live
in a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and
opinions) and a right to belong to some kind of organised
community, only when millions of people emerge who have
lost and could not regain these rights because of the new
global situation” (emphasis mine).
83
protection. The inalienable rights proposed by the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) as
the property of all human beings simply on the
grounds of being human turn out in the end to
be mere fiction. Refugees and asylum seekers,
Agamben suggests, are so disquieting to the
notion of the nation, primarily because by “break-
ing the continuity between man and citizen, nativ-
ity and nationality”,59 they upset the fiction of the
modern nation-state, which rests on the idea that
birth itself, via the alchemies of ius sanguinis and
ius soli, equals citizenship, which in turn equals
nation.60
Returning once more to the distinction
between zoe, natural life, and bios, political life,
this last scene helps us understand bare life as an
exposed, politicised form of zoe. As philosopher
Catherine Mills writes: “Being neither zoe nor
bios, bare life emerges from within this distinc-
tion and can be defined as life exposed to death,
especially in the form of sovereign violence.”61
In being shown how this violence operates to
maintain the very ordinary state of exception
that resides at the heart of Switzerland’s asy-
lum regime, we, the audience, are prompted to
re-think how we might position ourselves vis-à-
vis the national. The only way out of this seeming
aporia, both of bare life and the states of excep-
tion, according to Agamben, is a flight forward
into a world in which politics is the sphere neither
of an end in itself nor of means subordinated to
an end; rather, it is the sphere of a pure medial-
ity without end, intended as the field of human
action and of human thought.62
The documentary ends not in “a sphere of
pure mediality,” but in sober reality, the last
scene showing the caregiver, Denis, once again
announcing to one of the inmates that his “spe-
cial flight” would be leaving the next morning.
In the seven years since Le vol spécial was
made, the number of people fleeing their homes
across the world has reached an all-time high,
and border regimes have become critically unsta-
59  Agamben, Homo Sacer, 131.
60  Agamben, Homo Sacer, 129.
61  Catherine Mills, Giorgio Agamben, Internet Encyclo-
pedia of Philosophy, http://www.iep.utm.edu/agamben/,
accessed June 2018.
62  Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends: Notes on Poli-
tics, trans Vincento Binetti and Cesare Casare, London and
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2000, p. 117.
84
ble. In Europe, this has led to thousands of
deaths in the waters of the Mediterranean, and a
perceived state of emergency in many European
countries that has fueled deadly deals between
the EU, Turkey and Libya. Rather than crumbling,
then, narratives of nationalism and nation states
have been strengthened, and innovative designs
for post-national belonging, which was Agam-
ben’s larger project, remain in the realm of uto-
pia. Amid the onslaught of news stories of din-
ghies sinking in the Mediterranean, of countless,
uncounted humans drowning in their quest to
reach safer shores, of barriers and walls erected
along borders, of refugee children separated from
their parents, of people held on remote islands in
prison-like conditions, the world drifts closer and
closer to a two-tiered society: those with stories
and those without; those with rights and those,
again in Arendt’s words, “without the right to have
rights”. The story of expulsion, it would seem, is
becoming a master narrative of its own, one with
the power to replace the fiction of human rights
for all.
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